Maya Juracán. To invent our own path, to make the revolution (audio in Spanish)

In this interview, Maya Juracán reflects on curatorial practice in Guatemala and the different forms this work has taken throughout her career, such as “community curating” and “curating in resistance.” These notions are intertwined with others that speak to the realities of the Guatemalan cultural landscape, arts education, and the emerging creation of an artists’ union to address precarity in the sector. Likewise, the staging of biennials emerges as a key focal point of a cultural activity built upon a network of locally grounded formats and self-managed, site-specific projects—such as La Revuelta and Casa Revoltosa. 

This capsule is part of the series Language and Scene of Art in Guatemala, which brings together voices from the artistic and curatorial field of a country whose cultural life is one of the most vibrant in Central America. Guatemala bears a historical wound—the internal armed conflict (1960–1996) and the systematic violence against Indigenous peoples—that has left an unavoidable ethical and political mark. This backdrop has given rise to an ecosystem of practices, archives, and spaces marked by a singular inventiveness. 

By “scene,” we mean here the set of agents, languages, and circuits—artists, curatorial practices, institutions, archives, pedagogies, and modes of circulation—that, in the Guatemalan context, experiment with forms of memory, resistance, and repair. Institutional milestones that have expanded the local lexicon are recognized; the conditions that have shaped different generations of artists are examined, as well as the counter-histories they have produced and the reactivation of Indigenous knowledge. On the curatorial and organizational level, the scene has generated models of self-management and biennials of high critical density alongside a fragile cultural system, prompting the invention of methodologies, protocols of care, and feminist and community-based modes of listening. This series thus attends to several interwoven lines: the aesthetic impulse of Indigenous peoples and their capacity to signal and subvert the pervasiveness of coloniality; the invention of curatorial languages and forms of organization—minimal museologies, living archives, residencies—that open up alternative pedagogies; and resistance to legacies of impunity through practices of memory, celebration, and collective repair that engage with the present moment. 

The series Language and Scene of Art in Guatemala forms part of one of the initiatives of the radio platform of the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), which seeks to shape a possible oral history of contemporary Central American art. Through a constellation of voices from the fields of artistic creation, research, curating, and cultural management, this project gathers a mosaic of perspectives and experiences around different episodes that have defined local and regional scenes in recent decades. It also brings together testimonies on individual and collective practices that help outline the range of aesthetic languages and currents of thought that define this territory. In this tentative history—born from conversation, orality, and listening, and avoiding any totalizing ambition—there lies a need to seek more porous, mutable, and affective ways of constructing narratives, creating archives, and generating interpretive communities around them. 

The Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) is an organization dedicated to the study, research, and dissemination of the practices, scenes, and histories of Central American art and its diasporas. It is housed within the Department of Studies at the Museo Reina Sofía. Its work unfolds across multiple programs and tempos: on the one hand, it seeks to contribute to the enrichment of knowledge about the art of this region through the Museum’s Collections, Library, residencies, and study programs; on the other, it aims to weave dialogues, collaborations, and connections based on reciprocity with the cultural scene in Central America. This is a pioneering initiative in its field, not only for giving visibility to a region historically overlooked by historiography, but also for advancing ways of working that, through structural imagination and research, generate lasting networks and projects.